Category: MOCs

It was about two years ago when I was reading (and re-reading) a number of the Railbricks Magazine issues that I found an excellent article on a corrugated tank car. It utilized the 2×2 sport LEGO® brick, which is often used on cars as a spoiler or some other accessory, to make a round shape. The original creator, Anthony Sava, is very creative and has a number of locomotives featured on Big Ben’s Bricks gallery page. Back to the Railbricks Magazine, you can find the instruction starting on page 25 of the Fall 2011 edition (Issue 10).

Anthony Sava’s LEGO Corrugated Tank Car Design

Long story short, it took me a few years to collect the LEGO® bricks required to complete this train. I wanted to build this train in a bright color and choose yellow, primarily due to the availability of yellow 2×2 sport LEGO® bricks. The inside of the train is quite complex in that the bottom section is built “up-side-down” to create the underside of the car. I am looking forward to using these cars in an industrial section of the Calgary Lego Train Club‘s display at Heritage Park‘s Railway Days at the end of September.

Many members in our club are very excited with Sage Railworks, a Belgium LEGO&reg; train fan, who has merged “O” scale wheels with spring loaded contacts and his own ingenuity to make power pick up off of metal 9V train track for Power Function (PF) motors, which are typically powered by batteries. The LEGO&reg; Group switched from metal track and motors with built in power pickup to PF motors and completely plastic track about six years ago (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Trains for more information on the history). For groups such as the Calgary LEGO&reg; Train Club, metal track is very important as we would consume too many batteries over the span of a multi-day show.

For more information, check out the following Bricklink page. There is also a very good article on EuroBricks.

I have been working for some time on a steam locomotive that is both functional as well as historically accurate. This steam locomotive is based on the Baldwin 4-4-0, which was used to construct the Canadian Pacific Railroad. These wood burning locomotives were also used on the main line for a few decades, but were phased out by coal and liquid fuelled locomotives.

I first completed the design (after several iterations) in ML CAD. I had also completed the design with LEGO®’s Digital Designer, but it has a limited number of the special bricks required to complete a design such as this.

Train Designed in MLCad

Here is a photograph of the finished product. The only challenge now is to get power from the LEGO® 9V steel track to the Power Functions motor. A common way to to this is to use a dead 9V train motor… but I would love to complete this using Silver Nickel wheels on a boggie to pick up the power.